In the thick of it

The Czech photographer Josef Koudelka was centre stage with his camera when the Russian tanks rolled into Prague in 1968 - it set the pattern for his work once he left his homeland. All he needed, he says, was a good night's sleep and plenty of film. Geoff Dyer reports on a man who made exile his home

Caught up in the swirl... Gypsies in the Czech Republic, 1966, by Josef Koudelka. Photograph: Thames & Hudson

The defining images of the Russian invasion of Prague in 1968 were smuggled out of Czechoslovakia and published anonymously, to protect the photographer and his relatives. Ironic, with the benefit of hindsight, since a glance at the pictures is enough to identify the perpetrator: Josef Koudelka, one of the least anonymous, most recognisable photographers in the medium's history. These pictures - of the citizens of Prague, swarming the streets as tanks rumble towards them - fixed the events of August 1968 in the mind as firmly as the one of the student in front of a tank in Tiananmen Square would do two decades later. The difference is that, where the Tiananmen picture was detached, taken from a distance, Koudelka's were snatched by someone caught up in the swirl and danger of events, as much a participant as his subjects.

Koudelka's method was a continuation of the practice he'd insisted upon when working at Prague's Theatre Beyond The Gate. The director was obliged to mount full dress rehearsals with the photographer on stage, moving among the actors, as if the play were making a record from inside itself. Thereafter the world became a stage on which Koudelka's view of its tragedies and dramas was enacted and recorded. Technically, the feeling of immersion in the image is often the result of his fondness for a wide-angle lens, which has the effect of prising open the action, of ushering the viewer into its midst.

Koudelka was born in 1938. He studied aeronautical engineering before becoming a full-time photographer in 1967. After the Prague pictures established his reputation - or at least that of an "anonymous Czech photographer" - Koudelka left the country on a three-month exit visa to photograph Gypsies, a project he'd begun in 1966. Failing to return home at the end of that period, he became stateless, a status he craved the way others yearn for money or fame. He felt at home in exile. All he needed, he insisted, was a good night's sleep, plenty of film, and time. Everything else was a seductive distraction: the less he had, the less there was to miss. "I needed to know that nothing was waiting for me anywhere," he has said. "That the place I was supposed to be was the place where I was at that moment, and that when there was nothing more to photograph there, then it was time to leave for another place."

In 1971, he joined the photo agency Magnum, which gave him the advantage when he was passing through of bedding down in the Paris office. The apparent meagreness of Koudelka's hobo existence was itself a kind of wealth. You can see that in some of his best-known pictures, from Slovakia and Romania, of people who, while possessing very little, are experiencing life and all its dreadfulness in grim abundance. In Koudelka's view, the glass is never half-full or half-empty; it is always overbrimming - even if what it is overbrimming with is tears. "The maximum" is what always interested him. "The maximum from me and the maximum from others."

Koudelka's pictures of Gypsies and exiles are in a recognisable documentary tradition, traceable back to André Kertész, but they have such a distinctive, primal quality as to make the idea of precedents seem absurd. His landscapes look like they have not so much been taken as dug from the soil that they frame. Likewise, the moments he depicts may be fleeting, but there is always a deeper intransigence about them. Far from being timeless (as is sometimes claimed), they are saturated in time. Especially the panoramic images of unpeopled space. The impression of stubbornness - a quality shared by the people and places he photographs - is confirmed rather than contradicted by Koudelka's claim that he is "drawn to what is ending, to what will soon no longer exist". The panoramas make the world look like a place where, against all odds, human life thrived - but only briefly.

In a way these panoramas are an extreme extension of the wide-angle format, pushing it towards an omniscience so stark that it distorts almost beyond recognition. That is one of the reasons Koudelka's pictures often suggest some kind of allegory or parable, while simultaneously resisting such readings. The Scottish novelist James Kelman has said that, for him, Franz Kafka is not a fabulist but a realist. At the risk of getting tangled up in a thicket of Ks, Koudelka makes Kelman's point about Prague-born Kafka seem reasonable and accurate. Or maybe the tail is wagging the dog. Perhaps, in Description Of A Struggle, Kafka was writing a prophetic catalogue essay, describing photographs that were yet to be taken:

"As though our sorrow had darkened everything, we sat high up on the mountain as in a small room, although a little earlier we had already noticed the light and wind of the morning. We sat close together in spite of not liking one another at all, but we couldn't move far apart because the walls were firmly and definitely drawn. We could, however, behave absurdly and without human dignity, for we didn't have to be ashamed in the presence of the branches above us and the trees standing opposite us."

· Koudelka is published by Thames & Hudson, priced £48. To order a copy for £43, call 0870 836 0875 or visit theguardian.com/bookshop.